8.1.3.6 The namazu Engine

Using the namazu engine requires creating and maintaining index files.
One directory should contain all the index files, and nnir must be told
where to find them by setting the nnir-namazu-index-directory
variable.

To work correctly the nnir-namazu-remove-prefix variable must
also be correct. This is the prefix to remove from each file name
returned by Namazu in order to get a proper group name (albeit with ‘/’
instead of ‘.’).

For example, suppose that Namazu returns file names such as
‘/home/john/Mail/mail/misc/42’. For this example, use the
following setting: (setq nnir-namazu-remove-prefix
"/home/john/Mail/") Note the trailing slash. Removing this prefix from
the directory gives ‘mail/misc/42’. nnir knows to remove
the ‘/42’ and to replace ‘/’ with ‘.’ to arrive at the
correct group name ‘mail.misc’.

Extra switches may be passed to the namazu search command by setting the
variable nnir-namazu-additional-switches. It is particularly
important not to pass any any switches to namazu that will change the
output format. Good switches to use include ‘–sort’, ‘–ascending’,
‘–early’ and ‘–late’. Refer to the Namazu documentation for further
information on valid switches.

Mail must first be indexed with the ‘mknmz’ program. Read the documentation
for namazu to create a configuration file. Here is an example:

For this example, mail is stored in the directories ‘~/Mail/mail/’,
‘~/Mail/lists/’ and ‘~/Mail/archive/’, so to index them go to
the index directory set in nnir-namazu-index-directory and issue
the following command:

mknmz --mailnews ~/Mail/archive/ ~/Mail/mail/ ~/Mail/lists/

For maximum searching efficiency you might want to have a cron job run
this command periodically, say every four hours.